A Tennessee man has been captured and charged with six counts of wire fraud and six counts of extortion for trying to blackmail former presidential nominee Mitt Romney and an accounting firm into paying him $1 million.
The Justice Department on Wednesday announced that
34-year-old Franklin resident Michael Mancil Brown was indicted
by a federal grand jury in Nashville for a scheme that took place
during Romney’s 2012 campaign for president.
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, an accounting firm, received an
anonymous letter last August from a sender who claimed to have
hacked into the firm’s computer network and stolen Romney’s tax
documents for the years before 2010. Romney had only publicly
released two years’ worth of tax returns, and critics demanded to
see a full picture of his finances.
“A scanned signature image for Mitt Romney from the 1040 forms
were scanned and included with the packages, taken from earlier
1040 tax forms gathered and stored on the flash drives,” the
letter said, according to a POLITICO report.
The sender threatened to publish the documents unless the
accounting firm deposits $1 million in Bitcoins — a digital
currency — into an online account. The letter came with computer
thumb drives, which the sender said were encrypted with the
documents. The letter threatened to send copies of the tax
returns to “all major news media outlets” with passwords
to open the documents if the demand was not met.
Similar letters were sent to Democratic and Republican party
groups throughout Franklin, Tenn., asking for Bitcoin donations
in return for copies of the documents. Some letters said that the
documents would be published in return for $1 million in Bitcoin.
One of the recipients was Peter Burr, chairman of the Williamson
County Democratic Party. Burr told POLITICO that he received a
package with the thumb drives and immediately dismissed it as a
joke.
“I was thinking this thing very possibly has viruses on
it,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is trash our
computer.”
After receiving the anonymous threats, PricewaterhouseCoopers
released a statement claiming that there was no evidence their
system had been accessed, and the Secret Service found no
evidence of a break-in. The Secret Service and the FBI jointly
launched an investigation into the incident.
The Department of Justice on Wednesday released the
statement announcing the capture and indictment of the suspect.
“Brown devised a scheme to defraud Romney, the accounting firm
of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and others by falsely claiming that
he had gained access to the PricewaterhouseCoopers internal
computer network and had stolen tax documents for Romney and his
wife, Ann D. Romney, for tax years prior to 2010,” the
statement says.
Republished with permission from: RT